Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Details: Last year at BrickFair VA, I hosted a seminar on the relationship between the LEGO fan community and the open source software community. Presumably most people who read this blog are already familiar with LEGO, but I think most LEGO fans don't really think about how our community resources and favorite software tools came about, or what makes a particular program likely to be maintained for the LEGO community once the program's creator has moved on.

The bulk of the seminar was a slideshowhosted on GitHub. Although this is a topic I had wanted to address for years (originally the plan was to debut the slides at NCSU's annual FOSS Fair event, however I have not been able to attend since putting the slides together), I was surprised when I focused in on it just how broad the topic really is. The version presented at BrickFair still felt rushed together (to me, anyway), and I've continued to make improvements to it since. There's still plenty of room to improve the slides yet, but I like to think they're a useful resource and a good starting point that anyone can use to talk about LEGO at an open source event or about open source at a LEGO event. In the spirit of open source and community-building, the slides themselves are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License and the source is available for contributions on GitHub.

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